The Supermarine Spitfire entered service with the RAF 70 years ago today.
Flight, which recently celebrated its 100th year in publishing, has reported on this great aircraft since its beginning so here are a few gems from back issues:
Spitfire and Concorde vie with London tube map as Britain's finest designs
Carolyn Grace: Flying Spitfires in her husband's memory
Flight's 100 Greatest Military Aircraft - Supermarine Spitfire
Other stuff from the archive....
And some Spitfire mentions in the discussion forum in AirSpace -
Spitfire in AirSpace discussions
Images in AirSpace to celebrate RAF's 90th anniversary
on August 4, 2008 6:14 PM | Reply
Back towards the end of the 1940s I was a National Serviceman undergoing pilot training. On the way back to the cadets' mess from an evening Link trainer session, I took a short cut through the hangar where I saw, all on its own, an unpainted, bare metal Spitfire under the blue-green mercury vapour lighting.
It took my breath away, and even today I remember it as perhaps the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. At least among man-made things. I wandered round it time and again and again and again, and even today am still in awe of those beautiful lines and that sight of "motion at a standstill".
In flight it's beautiful too, but few, if any subsequent aircraft, have that unique ability to express in their lines the speed and manoueuvrability of which they are capable.(Some have come close, though !)
In a long career in and around aviation which followed that indelibly memorable experience, I have always been grateful to Mr. Mitchell and his team for their engineering and artistic achievement.
Truly that day I realised what the poet meant by saying that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.